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Samsung Cancels Production of New BD Players in U.S.


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Tenchi



Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 4463
Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer.
PostPosted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 10:12 pm Reply with quote
SilverTalon01 wrote:

Actually, this is a pain in the ass. To play a 4k BD off a pc to your 4k tv, there is a dumb amount of DRM involved. I looked at the option of getting a drive because I didn't really want to have a special player just for 4k BDs, but I quickly gave up.


On a slight tangent, I don't know if it can (theoretically) play 4K Blu-Rays but I did invest in a Samsung BD-ROM drive a few years ago only to be frustrated that Blu-Ray DRM is so severe that I can't watch standard Blu-Ray discs on my laptop at all, or at least the hoops I have to jump through to accomplish what I thought would be a simple feat are such that I've never been able to find a solution that actually works even using VLC.

I, of course, have a standalone Blu-Ray player and now a Playstation 4, so it's not that big a deal that I can't watch Blu-Rays on my laptop but if I had known how the Blu-Ray consortium had made it nigh impossible to watch Blu-Rays on a laptop, I'd have saved my money and would just have bought a DVD-ROM drive instead.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4564
PostPosted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 11:06 pm Reply with quote
Ugh. If other companies are going to start making awful decisions like this, I should probably buy a good stand-alone player sooner rather than later.
Tenchi wrote:

On a slight tangent, I don't know if it can (theoretically) play 4K Blu-Rays but I did invest in a Samsung BD-ROM drive a few years ago only to be frustrated that Blu-Ray DRM is so severe that I can't watch standard Blu-Ray discs on my laptop at all, or at least the hoops I have to jump through to accomplish what I thought would be a simple feat are such that I've never been able to find a solution that actually works even using VLC.

I, of course, have a standalone Blu-Ray player and now a Playstation 4, so it's not that big a deal that I can't watch Blu-Rays on my laptop but if I had known how the Blu-Ray consortium had made it nigh impossible to watch Blu-Rays on a laptop, I'd have saved my money and would just have bought a DVD-ROM drive instead.

Legally you're pretty much stuck buying something like CyberLink's PowerDVD, which I only have myself because it came bundled with my BD-RW drive. Probably less legally, I've used a piece of software called Leawo Blu-ray player, mainly because it lets you select your BD region without needing to use up the (ridiculous) limited changes on your drive's firmware.
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omiya



Joined: 21 Sep 2011
Posts: 1823
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:43 am Reply with quote
I re-check the original article and see that it applies to both standard and 4K blu-ray players no longer being released by Samsung into the US market.

There are a few 4K anime titles (e.g. Your Name, Gundam00 the movie) but sadly not as far as I'm aware any 4K anison concert titles.

Being in Australia I'd probably get a friend a Panasonic 4K blu-ray player if they already had a 4K television, it's not something that I could afford and make good use of myself at this stage. Australia's internet was sabotaged from reliably supporting high bandwidth streaming so that isn't as attractrive an option as it appears to be in the USA.

To follow on what another commenter said, the smartphone market has reduced the digital compact camera market - I have over several years used a Panasonic Lumx FT4 (4 x optical zoom, waterproof, features that smartphones available here lack) but would like to get something newer while there is still something available in the market.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 7:57 am Reply with quote
Okay, first of all, chill--It's SAMSUNG. (Which, to home-theater fans, is the equivalent of saying "Murph, it's just Dan Quayle!")

And Samsung cancels everything. They're always the first to: They dropped out of 3DTV when they wanted to make Curved Screens. When Curved didn't sell, they dropped those when they wanted to make 4K. And now they're dropping 4K because....because they're Samsung.
And every, every, every single time, the industry goes into panic mode and cries Beginning of the End, because they either don't know one company from another, or haven't seen this cry-wolf act before. OFTEN.

Second is a little news item from last month:
Remember those movie DVD's you used to get, that had that sticker saying "Redeem your code for your free Ultraviolet digital movie" on the front? Well, you can't now....Why? Because as of last January 15, Ultraviolet DRM is now officially out of business, after already having three merchants go bankrupt and the studios drop their content a year before. No one's brave enough to come out and say it, but Digital-locker purchase movies were a full-fledged FLOP. No one wanted them, no matter how hard studios tried to push their agendas to wipe physical retail off the map, because--among other reasons--the customer base simply did not want to buy imaginary goods on the Internet. Disk arguments aside, if I'm paying $20 for a movie, I want an Amazon box to arrive on my doorstep, or I don't feel as if I "really" bought anything...Anyone else? Or am I alone in this?
(Another problem is that the studios were convinced Digital was going to catch on because they were trying to explain why MP3 music replaced CD, and kept telling their customers, "Wouldn't you like to take your movies on the go?" No, I wouldn't...That's what I do with my music, not my movies.)

So: If Samsung is going to cry This Week's Latest Death about physical disk, I'd sure love to know what they think is going to replace it. As a customer with Amazon Prime, I'd love to hear the guy who actually thinks we'll all be watching Streaming for movies. Laughing

Now, as to whether 4K is taking the hit (and regular Blu is paying the price because...they're Samsung), that's a different question:
4K seem to have been groomed to be the New Replacement, while the public's tantrum against 3DTV was still fresh, almost literally from the moment it was announced, and the entire industry rolled out the red carpet because it said in the "script" that the New Tech would immediately replace the Old Tech. Like Digital, they failed to ask a few basic questions like, did the audience know what it was?...Or did it serve a crying need that would make them rush out to spend four figures on a new setup?
We'll give 4K Blu-ray credit, in that 4K was delayed because the studios and the hardware companies couldn't decide whether we'd be disking or streaming, and right from the start, the market was almost 100% disking...That customer battle was over before it was fought. But it was a niche market that knew how 4K was different from Blu, or cared--Customers bought 4K screens because they understood "Bigger!", but why they should buy a new player was never sufficiently explained.
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Just Passing Through



Joined: 04 Apr 2011
Posts: 276
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 11:09 am Reply with quote
Tenchi wrote:


On a slight tangent, I don't know if it can (theoretically) play 4K Blu-Rays but I did invest in a Samsung BD-ROM drive a few years ago only to be frustrated that Blu-Ray DRM is so severe that I can't watch standard Blu-Ray discs on my laptop at all, or at least the hoops I have to jump through to accomplish what I thought would be a simple feat are such that I've never been able to find a solution that actually works even using VLC.

I, of course, have a standalone Blu-Ray player and now a Playstation 4, so it's not that big a deal that I can't watch Blu-Rays on my laptop but if I had known how the Blu-Ray consortium had made it nigh impossible to watch Blu-Rays on a laptop, I'd have saved my money and would just have bought a DVD-ROM drive instead.


I have an Asus BD-Rom, VLC player and Redfox AnyDVD installed, and I can watch everything Blu (ironically the DVD support isn't as hot, as it throws the occasional wobbly at Funimation Region 1 DVDs, but Blu-ray support is rock solid)
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 11:47 am Reply with quote
Tenchi wrote:
a lot of people watch Blu-Rays on game consoles (though I tried that myself for the first time on the PS4 the other day but didn't like using the controller as a remote).

Sony sells a traditional "stick" controller with play/pause/ff/rew, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Remote-Control-Receiver-playstation-4/dp/B01KICHFQQ

I use one with my PS3 when watching discs or Playstation Vue.
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jdnation



Joined: 15 May 2007
Posts: 1994
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:38 pm Reply with quote
EricJ2 wrote:
Disk arguments aside, if I'm paying $20 for a movie, I want an Amazon box to arrive on my doorstep, or I don't feel as if I "really" bought anything...Anyone else? Or am I alone in this?


Nope. I'm also the same. I still buy music CDs if I want to own something. Anything else I stream. Frankly I just listen to a lot of music via Youtube. And Youtube's caught onto this fact and apparently has some dedicated streaming app just for music.

Streaming will be BIG and will be what the majority of people will do. We obviously can't own everything. So if we want to check something out or kill time, then streaming is the best option.

When we want to put money down. We'll buy physical.

The only thing in danger here is the digital downloading market. And it's time is ticking as internet speeds improve to the point where instant streaming will be the ideal way of being 'digital.'

This will happen for video games as well. I can see Sony and Microsoft moving towards two sku plans.

The cheap PlayStation/Xbox Streaming device.
Benefits:
- Cheaper price of entry.
- No theoretical need to upgrade hardware ever again. You're good for PS5,6,7,8,9 etc.
- Developers can just improve the graphics via updates made on the server side. So streamers can get the benefits of improved graphics immediately while physical console owners will have to wait until a new physical box is released if ever.
- All the benefits of digital without the wait times to download. Everything is immediate and all saves can be local or on cloud.
- No need to worry about patches, all improvements/updates are server side.

Cons:
- Subscription fees (could be more expensive or cheaper depending on your habits)
- Minimum Subscription fees might have to be paid even for an a la carte model access to certain purchasable games.
- Internet dependent.
- Speed/latency may not make for the best native resolution experience or lag/input feedback.


The more expensive dedicated hardware
Benefits:
- Can buy and own and lend, borrow and sell games.
- No need for internet dependency.
- Nobody can take your games away when some legal thing expires.
- Full HD source quality rendered in real time.

Cons:
- More expensive price of entry.
- Depending on your habits you might feel left out by not upgrading your box to the pro v.1, v.2 etc. and will have to upgrade eventually when there is a cut off point for minimum spec requirements to be raised significantly as with generations.
- Might have to download large patches.


One drawback to the move towards streaming would be that I'd see more developers adopting the Free2Play model and you'd have a shift to more episodic delivery of games. And with a more heavier emphasis on microtransaction models.

One benefit would be that developers can change things based on feedback on their end. On the other hand, if things aren't going according to expectations, you can even see titles get cancelled after a few levels and left incomplete regardless of critical acclaim solely because it is not generating certain income.

On the other hand the above is only of concern for third parties, whereas first parties, thanks to guaranteed income might be happy to cater to the crowd with critical indie-like darlings and slavish projects regardless of reception because in the end everything shares the same pool of revenue. So theoretically, all it would take is one major 'Overwatch'/'Fortnite' title that is bringing in the subscription revenue, that helps to fund five other smaller titles that are single player non-recurring revenue focused - your Gravity Rushes, Portals, Uncharteds, Ico's, Niers etc.

But who are we kidding?

Knowing corporate interests, the streaming future might just be making us pay extra to stream what are essentially Free 2 Play games with microtransaction/lootbox models without the necessity of an installation.

In a way, 3rd parties will have no choice. only the platform holders might bother making some good single player quality titles for the sake of ticking that variety checkbox.

Also there is no need for 3rd parties to rely on first parties if that's the case. They will just demand and control their own streaming service and revenue, for a separate fee.

At the very least one would hope the streaming future would at least make available the entire back-catalogue of classic games. Though there will be exceptions for certain titles that are reliant on licensed material that would be a pain in the butt to revitalize.

----

That said, the future of physical may one day move away from discs to a form of cartridge memory storage, though for the time being pressing discs is the cheapest form, whereas anything requiring memory will require a bump in costs to make. Though if physical shrinks enough, they might consider this, and doing so offers more DRM possibilities.

I'm one of the people with a great passive 3D-TV, so I also buy good 3-D films on blu-ray like Judge Dredd, Gravity, The Hobbit movies, Life of Pi, Blade Runner 2049 etc.

There are moves to get the 3-D experience down without the need for glasses. Some kind of autostereoscopic solution, or even some research into holography, or just a multi-panel set-up. It'll be cool to see where that goes.

Moves are also being made for Higher frame rates, the Hobbit films were shot in native 3-D at 48 fps and it was a big upgrade for me to see in the theater.

Obviously there will be some delivery needed for films at double the framerate or higher (or even some filmakers argue for the freedom to have variable framerates within the same film, just as one can play around with aspect ratio for direction.

Also, while its still in its infancy, VR is another aspect that would necessitate physical media with local rendering. I can see the future of films being basically recorded with a wide angle 3-D scope via scanning cameras, and then that data rendered in real time using a game engine.

With all this, digital won't be able to keep pace, nor will streaming this data. So if movies want to stay relevant, then there will always be a need to have physical delivery to keep pace with advancements in the medium.

The data requirements will only go up when we consider the possibilities:
- Higher frame rates (48 fps currently)
- 3-D essentially requiring both left and right eye perspectives, which again doubles your film storage.
- VR - either real time data on disc, or an even larger requirement for image storage for every frame.
- Sound data - for those with audio systems that take advantage of it. But even surround headphones will be great.
- Motion seat data (hey, I'm sure there are some who really love this, just as we like rumble in our video games).

There are lots of possibilities. And while it may seem sacrilegious to artists, I can even see other possibilities of customization for films whether you want to play around with lighting or colour conditions in your films, where even Sony has demonstrated at CES that cameras can capture HDR and real time image data for photography that can then be adjusted and tweaked to your liking.

So with developments, the future ain't all bad for the necessities of physical.

The only real reason companies want to limit it is for purposes of control - to prevent not just piracy, but also sharing and resale.

But not only that - the subscription model - is a means of guaranteed income regardless of what you put out. So guaranteed subscription revenue means companies benefit and are protected, even from the occasional bombs.

If a film like Alita was made together with Lego Movie 2, and Avengers, based on projections of expected guaranteed subscription revenue, then it would make no difference if Alita is badly received by critics or that nobody watches, because the money already came in regardless, and subscribers will still feel they got their money's worth thanks to Lego Movie and Avengers.

So subscriptions help prevent fallout from commercial bombs. It reduces the risk for the corps. This can be both good and bad for everyone.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 7:24 pm Reply with quote
jdnation wrote:
Streaming will be BIG and will be what the majority of people will do. We obviously can't own everything. So if we want to check something out or kill time, then streaming is the best option.


And here we have Big Problem #3 that killed off Digital, and made Chicken-Little Samsung think that the Physical-Disk Sky Was Falling: Streaming did NOT "replace movies". It replaced Cable TV. It's what we sit down on Thursday night to watch, just like we used to click channels to see what was airing at random.
Just as VHS replaced local-station TV broadcast movies in the 80's, but it didn't replace TV shows...We watched our movies on tape, and we still watched Seinfeld on Thursday nights. A fact Netflix seems to have picked up on, now that it's setting out to be "The new TV network", and basically letting the movies go hang.

What made it a problem was that tech-illiterate studios--most of whose execs or analysts never used the product in their own spare time--literally could not tell one from the other, and couldn't grasp the difference between DRM (the late, unlamented Ultraviolet, where you buy your movies to reside in a permanent "cloud") and the rise of monthly-subscription Streaming, where you only pay once a month to stream whatever Netflix has available whenever you're in the mood.
Media analysts talked about them as if they were one and the same, end of story--Headlines would cry "Digital is more popular than ever!", and go on to talk about how many new subscribers Netflix and Amazon were getting for their original shows, and act as if that somehow reflected on DRM sales...It DIDN'T.
Digital rental on Vudu/Amazon also caught on, basically putting Redbox out of business, because that was something the public could use it for--Rent a movie on Friday night, "return" it with just a delete-click. There was a need that the technology could fill, and it filled it...It just didn't fill anything else.

Leaving aside "pride" or "customer loyalty" (which the third-party Blu-disk companies like Shout, Criterion and Warner Archive built on Twitter), Blu-ray survived seven years of the "Digital Wars"--and won--because it was what the public wanted. You can't sell them something they don't, any more than you can sell a hungry man something other than bread.
The customer knows his own need from his own specific experience, and if the product doesn't fill it, they're not going to beat a path to its door, no matter how "better" the maker think his mousetrap is.

Quote:
I'm one of the people with a great passive 3D-TV, so I also buy good 3-D films on blu-ray like Judge Dredd, Gravity, The Hobbit movies, Life of Pi, Blade Runner 2049 etc.


I've got a great ACTIVE 3DTV (the one with the electronically-synched glasses), and that's an example of a home-theater product that filled a real, existing customer need:
You can watch the Ghostbusters remake on regular Blu or on 4K Blu, and apart from a shiny degree of clarity, you're not going to get a different movie experience unless you're tech-buff enough to notice it. But if you watch Avatar or Vincent Price's "House of Wax" on 2D Blu, and the filmmakers had made it specifically with 3D in mind, you're not watching the movie as it was intended to be displayed in theaters...And that violates the one sacred principle of Blu-ray. A particular kind of film needed a particular kind of technology that other films didn't, and if you had something to play it, you could.

"But 3DTV flopped, didn't it?" Not quite--The correct term is that it was publicly lynched:
3DTV came out in 2010, right exactly at the point where a lot of folk had just finally bought their 2D Blu-ray player and HDTV flatscreen, and at that very moment were being told they had to scrap it for something better...That didn't go down well. The idea for companies like Sony, Panasonic and, yep, Samsung to try and hold big-seller movies like Avatar and the Shrek series "hostage" as exclusive bonuses to hardware sales didn't exactly do anything for the public's complaint that "Greedy companies!" were "Making them buy something every two years!"

So yeah, we got one. (high-five) Cool
But now that the rest of us have had nine years to calm down and count to ten, the 3D Blu titles also happen to look pretty good on a Playstation VR, where 3D-video technology could actually be hitched up to a wagon and fill a purpose.
Anyone out there showing off that they're into the new headsets, try seeing how one of the "old" disks looks like on it, if you're curious about what you missed while you were too angry.
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jdnation



Joined: 15 May 2007
Posts: 1994
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 8:46 pm Reply with quote
I've always been curious about when anime would make a jump to stereoscopic 3-D.

Even Disney put out a few 3-D titles of 2D stuff like Lion King. I picked it up and its' pretty amusing.

Also the Spiderverse movie also nicely recreated 2D elements into 3-D. I'm looking forward to buying that when it releases.

I figured that some studios might've tried converting stuff like the CG Appleseed movies into 3-D. Or even something like Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, as an experiment, or even things like Final Fantasy Advent Children or Kingsglaive.

But so far, nothing.

Most anime is made cheap, so understandably these would just be added costs. But I feel there'd be a market for converting some classics into 3-D. Or even some upcoming slavish productions like Evangelion 4.0. You'd think the otaku market would love to check out the girls in 3-D from every dutch angle.

That or if Netflix's next GITS series is entirely CG, that they'd leverage 3-D for blu-ray sales.

Also, unless one has a good rig PC, there were a few games using 3-D on PS3 like the ICO/Shadow of the Colossus collection, and Super Stardust that were great. Sadly that didn't pan out for more titles due to the obvious hit in power that titles would take for visuals. But that stereoscopic vision is proudly carried on now with VR.

I'm personally hoping that Sony and Microsoft were forward thinking enough that just as their Pro and 1X models improve resolution and framerate, and good feature might be that older back catalog games on PS5/Nextbox could be improved and played in 3-D. If only for Sony to push PSVR more, and this would give a big boost to incentive to own a VR headset. But there's slim chance of that happening.

But I do hope VR means a resurgence for more 3-D projects that aren't virtual.
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Relairknight



Joined: 16 Mar 2007
Posts: 128
PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 3:01 pm Reply with quote
I really hope physical media never goes away completely, with digital and streaming you're really just renting the opportunity to view something for a limited time, even when you 'buy' it. Internet goes down? Company goes out of business? Account hacked? HD crashes? You're just screwed. There's nothing better than adding a new, tangible item to your collection that you will have forever.
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Color2413



Joined: 08 Jul 2014
Posts: 49
PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 11:21 pm Reply with quote
The current "hot" 4K player among the videophile crowd is the Panasonic - DP-UB820. It is considered a worthy successor to the Oppo players. At $499, it's pricey.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 9:30 am Reply with quote
I can't help but wonder how much of this is simply the fact that Samsung may be losing market share to other makers of BD hardware as opposed to the decline of physical media in general?
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Hellfish



Joined: 19 Dec 2007
Posts: 391
Location: Mexico
PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 3:09 pm Reply with quote
AkumaChef wrote:
I can't help but wonder how much of this is simply the fact that Samsung may be losing market share to other makers of BD hardware as opposed to the decline of physical media in general?


I have that feeling too.
And by the way, i feel that most of the market that was going to get a Bluray player already got one, and is not like they are going to change it every 3 years. So I wouldn't be surprised if we are at a point where sales have slow down and are only renewed by people who are recently living independently, or people who bought a really old one that no longer works.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 3:15 pm Reply with quote
AkumaChef wrote:
I can't help but wonder how much of this is simply the fact that Samsung may be losing market share to other makers of BD hardware as opposed to the decline of physical media in general?


That's very, very, VERY possible: As I originally ranted Wink , Samsung has a bad reputation among home-theater fans as, quote, "the Jeffrey Katzenberg of home-theater"--Referring to Katzenberg's infamous habit of proclaiming any entertainment trend, quote, "dying" (2D animation, catalog-disk retail, 3D theatrical, and even cineplexes in general), and the gullible industry believing them, if Dreamworks personally happened to lose a bundle on "Sinbad", "Turbo" or "Shrek the Third", and wanted to pass the buck for blame.

When I was first shopping for a 3DTV screen in 2010, Samsung had the most and cheaper models, but every single online review I read was from unhappy customers who claimed their sets "died out" in two to three years.
I don't know if their technology ever improved over nine years, but I've wisely avoided the brand ever since, and I may not have been the only one.

Also, for some reason, despite the fact that DVD is now considered a "dinosaur", only fit for grocery-checkout releases, kiddy cartoons and TV boxsets, the industry is still in 2008 mode of thinking Blu-ray is a, quote, "niche for home-theater tech-fans", and reasons that the "high prices" are still keeping people aware eleven years later--
Even though most Blu players are now so common, they're at the price that DVD players were selling back when Blu was first released. During the Format Wars, both Blu and HDDVD were rare items at premium prices, and when customers complained, early adopters said "Wait till the technology becomes common, you'll see the price go down". It's become common, and the price has come down, and some companies still can't deal with that.
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